Fire-policy review will have plenty to consider

Some say let blazes burn in the wild, while others support standard prevention

By ROBERT MCCLURE AND LISA STIFFLER, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTERS

Published 10:00 pm, Wednesday, August 29, 2001

OKANOGAN -- Researcher Kirsten Harma surveyed the flank of Soap Lake Mountain on a recent day when firefighters battled a wildfire there.

"Prevent Forest Fires," urged a nearby sign next to a picture of Smokey Bear toting a shovel.

But, as Harma noted, "there are no trees here." Not a tree in sight. The hillside was covered in densely packed sagebrush, rabbit brush and bitter brush -- all waist-high plants that grow readily in the "shrub-steppe" ecosystem common to this part of Eastern Washington.

And that is a major point of a report being released today by Harma's organization, the Winthrop-based Pacific Biodiversity Institute: Most of the "forest" fires that have burned this summer in the West aren't burning in forests at all, but rather in grasslands, deserts and shrub lands.

It is a key point as Congress prepares to review national fire policy. Some members of Congress and the timber industry argue for aggressively cutting trees on National Forest land and building roads into wilderness areas -- all to aid firefighting.

Today's report shows that only about one-seventh of the land that has burned so far in major fires this spring and summer is in the national forest system. That is comparable to figures for the last five years, which show that less than a fifth of the land burned in summer wildfires in the West was in national forests.

"We're not going to solve wildfire problems by thinning forests," said Peter Morrison, executive director of the Pacific Biodiversity Institute and the lead author of the report.

"Although wildfires that burn through forests are a significant land-management issue, more fires often burn through other vegetation types," the report says. "A national fire policy that focuses on thinning and prescription burns in our National Forests will not address this main issue."

The report's authors recommend that Congress appropriate money to make homes and other buildings in fire-prone areas "fire safe." That involves replacing wooden roofs with metal ones, clearing brush from around houses and other, simple steps. That way, when fires do burn, as they inevitably will, the homes will be safe.

The Pacific Biodiversity Institute researchers, whose work was funded primarily by private foundations, looked at all wildfires so far this year. They looked closely at 12 major fires in six states, including five in Washington, that represent more than half the acreage burned this year.

The best way to protect houses "is to target the house itself" instead of surrounding forests, he said. "This has always been a dumb problem, because we've always known how to fix it."

But he cautioned that no one approach -- such as fireproofing homes or even aggressive forest thinning -- is the answer to all fire situations.

Morrison pointed out that last year's Dog Creek fire in the William O. Douglas Wilderness, an area that natural ecology dictates should burn from time to time, cost about $3 million to fight.

"Fires like that oftentimes just go out (on their own). If you take that $3 million, you can create a fire-safe situation for a lot of people. And you increase the value of their homes," Morrison said. "It's exactly what President Bush and the Republican Congress say they want to do -- give the money back to taxpayers."

Another hotly debated topic in fire management is whether to conduct controlled burns or just let fires burn once they ignite.

Morrison and other researchers point out that many forests depend on periodic fires to perform ecological functions, including clearing out brush.

Indicating the brushy terrain that Harma was looking at on the side of Soap Lake Mountain, Morrison said:

"This will be gorgeous next spring. You'll be surprised how green it will be, how flowers will be blooming. This is not an abnormal event here. It's like the snow falling in the winter."

Fighting fires, on the other hand, can cause ecological disturbances, Morrison said. Bulldozed firebreaks can lead to erosion. Invasive foreign weeds can take hold there. Wetlands are destroyed. Fire retardant dropped from airplanes can harm frogs and other amphibians, he said.

The Pacific Biodiversity Institute recommends letting backcountry fires burn and fighting only those fires that threaten homes, buildings and other features of settled areas.

Pyne cautioned that reintroducing fire after decades of suppression is tricky business.

"Reintroducing fire is like reintroducing a lost species," he said. "You have to create a habitat for it."

That might include reducing livestock grazing, replanting vegetation, lightly thinning brush and trees, or intensely thinning small trees using machines.

"Critics will call it logging," but a more accurate term is "woody weeding," Pyne said.

Fires that struck forests last year "incinerated" some of the landscape, he said. It isn't clear that the forests will return any time soon.

Timber companies have vociferously lobbied for thinning. Chris West, vice president of the industry's Portland-based American Forest Resource Council, said the alternative to fires that devastate the landscape is to thin the trees, which would "reduce the fuel loading and return these stands to a more natural condition."

West argues for several methods.

"I agree 100 percent that we need to do defensible space around homes ... but we also need to be worried about burning thousands and tens of thousands of acres of wildlife habitat," he said.

Near where Morrison walked on the flanks of Soap Lake Mountain on the Colville Indian Reservation, Alan Todd surveyed the ruins of his boat and his mobile home, where his uncle had been living.

He had spent three days fighting fires with his father, using shovels and garden hoses, and managed to save his father's house.

But Todd freely admits that he should have done a lot more work before the fire, such as replacing the wooden roof and clearing out brush around the house.

"This," Todd said, pointing to the house where he and his father reside, "is an example of what not to be like."

The fire here seemingly hopscotched around, claiming some homes but not others.

Just down the road, where a neighbor had cleared out the yard and built a home using less flammable materials, the house was spared.

Meanwhile, at Icicle Creek near Leavenworth, one of the firefighters' first tasks was to clear out brush among the resort homes in the area, said Betty Higgins, a Forest Service spokeswoman.

Virtually none of the homes in the area had been made fire-safe, and all were located in densely packed woods that had not burned in many years.

Examining these fires with a computerized geographic information system to determine what kinds of territory has burned, Pacific Biodiversity Institute researchers determined that the fires across the West are much like those here on the Colville Indian reservation: shrub lands and lightly forested areas.

The report points out that, nationwide, this has not been a particularly fearsome year for fires. The acres burned is slightly below the average recorded for the past 10 years.

And even last year's fire season, covered extensively in the news media, did not measure up to the 100-year average, the report says.

Even if the fires are not of historic proportions, all the parties agree that humans can't coexist with the blazes under current conditions. But resolution of the present situation -- of wood-roofed homes and forests full of fuel -- is going to be complicated.

"There's no easy solution to this," Pyne said. "The West has many fire problems, not just one."